TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Genetic recovery with George Church

Here George Church explains the current state of genetic engineering
simply and clearly. It is not just practical to produce a mammoth
and most other Pleistocene creatures since we have frozen DNA to work
with but most likely quite a few others. Certainly those collected
before extinction during the Age of Discovery can all be likely
recovered this way.

That is the really exciting part of this work. As we fully restore
Terra's fecundity through terraforming we will also be able to
reintroduce creatures lost to us in a way that keeps them properly
protected. That is the real problem because of our nasty friend the
rat in particular.

I am looking forward to a refugia holding the full Ice Age menagerie.
Maybe we can assign the island of Anticosti in the Gulf of St
Laurence to this task.

This method is also capable of recovering the Neanderthal in theory
at least although that may turn out to be way too difficult.

George
Church talks about resurrecting Neanderthals, engineered longevity
and synthetic fuel for about twenty cents per gallon

JANUARY
21, 2013

Der
Spiegel has an interview with George Church.Nextbigfuture
has covered George Church's work and his recent book Regensis several
times.We
had previously covered his approach to resurrecting the Wooly Mammoth
and Neanderthals which is one of the main focuses of the Der Spiegel
interview.Full
blown Genomic Engineering for resurrection the Wooly Mammoth and
NeanderthalThis
could be done with MAGE (Multiplex automated genomic engineering)
technology. MAGE was also developed by George. Genomic Engineering
works a few nucleotides at a time. MAGE
works in a wholesale fashion.1.
Take the elephant genome2.
Break it into 30,000 pieces of 100,000 DNA units in length3.
Use a reconstructed Mammoth genome as a template4.
Select the important changes to make to the elephant genome5.
Reassemble the changed pieces6.
Transfer into the egg cell for the female elephant to give birth to
the new Mammoth clone

The
same can be done for the Neanderthal.

However,
the important thing is that if the technology of genomic engineering
can do these kinds of miracles then other
radical biology will also be possible.

CRISPR
is an RNA-guided editing tool for facile, robust, and multiplexable
human genome engineering.CRISPR
needs 20 base pairs of RNA for targeting. The previous best genetic
engineering method TALE Nuclease used 2000 base pairs for targeting
and was about 0.37% accurate for targeting.

CRISPR
is 100 times easier to create the targeting and 10 to 20 times more
effective at targeting than prior approaches.

\Church
on Synthetic Fuel

Church:
The fact is that we
already have organisms that can produce fuel compatible with current
car engines. These organisms convert carbon dioxide and light into
fuels by basically using photosynthesis.
Synthetic fuel can currently be produced in the tens of thousand of
liters. The cost is $1.30 a gallon for synthetic fuel. And the price
will go down. Most of these systems are at least a factor of five
away from theoretical limits, maybe even a factor of 10.

Synthetic
Biology for Medicine

The
potential of synthetic life is particularly large in pharmaceuticals.
The
days of classic, small molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it
is a miracle that they work in the first place. They kind of dose
your whole body. They cross-react with other molecules.
Now, we are getting better and better at programming cells. So I
think cell
therapies are going to be the next big thing. If
you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible amount of
sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example ... All
you have to do is take your blood cell precursors out of your body,
reengineer them using gene therapy to knock out both copies of your
CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your
body. Then
you can't get AIDS any more, because the virus can't enter your
cells.

Life
Extension

Could
we improve humans genetically in this way?

There
are stem cell therapies already. There are hematopoietic stem cell
transplants that are widely practiced, and skin stem cell
transplants. Once you have enough experience with these techniques
you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things to do is
to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of
cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can
crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower
probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years
old. What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered
desirable.

In
order to find out [which genes to change for longevity], we are now
involved in sequencing as many people as possible who have lived for
over 110 years. There are only 60 of those people in the world that
we know of.

It's
too early to say [about results of analyzing supercentenarians]. But
we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just
beginning.

SPIEGEL:
You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees
longevity?

Church:
That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have
their own little advantage over everybody else. What we are looking
for is protective alleles. If they each have their own answer, we can
look at all of them and ask, what happens if you put them all in one
person? Do they cancel each other out, or do they synergize?

SPIEGEL:
You seriously envisage a new era, in which genes are used as
anti-aging-cures?

Church:
Why not? A lot of things that were once left to luck no longer have
to be if we add synthetic biology into the equation. Let's take an
example: virus resistance …

SPIEGEL:
... which is also achievable using synthetic biology?

Church:
Yes, it turns out there are certain ways to make organisms of any
kind resistent to any viruses. If you change the genetic code …

Church:
I certainly respect other people's faith. But, in general, in
religion you wouldn't want people to starve. We have 7 billion people
living on this planet. If part of the solution to feed those people
is to make their crops resistant to viruses, then you have to ask: Is
there really anything in the Bible that says you shouldn't make
virus-resistant crops? I don't think there's anything fundamentally
more religiously problematic about engineering a dog or a cow or a
horse the way we have been doing it for 10,000 years versus making a
virus-resistant crop.

Church:
Why? In technology, we generally don't take leaps. It's this very
slow crawl. We are not going to be making a virus-resistant human
before we make a virus-resistant cow. I don't understand why people
should be so deeply hurt by that kind of technology.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Nice blog with lots of interesting info. However the layout of his blog is the worst I've ever encountered. Unless you are only interested in the last few posts it's useless. To go back and view previous posts I have to click, wait for previous post to show up, then go through the entire process again to see the previous post, all the while having no idea what the next post (in reverse will be). I wanted to see what you had posted in October, but your 'barriers to entry' are so high that I couldn't even get to the beginning of January. It's a real shame. I'll check back a couple of times but if thE format remains the same I won't be hanging around. PS, there are quite a few spelling mistakes which normally wouldn't bother me but I don't normally read blogs by academics. A C Clarke has an E on the end, what kind of fan can't even spell his name correctly?

About Me

Jan 2015 - 3 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published by Physics Essays published by the American Institute of Physics and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly.
40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled 'Paradigms Shift'.
I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.